Setting the date/time using "date"

To change the date on your FreeRunner, issue one of the following commands:

date -s MMDDhhmm
date -s MMDDhhmmYYYY
date -s MMDDhhmmYYYY.ss

where MM is the month, 01-12; DD is the day, 01-31; hhmm is the time, 0000-2359; YYYY is the optional year, and .ss is the optional seconds.

Setting date/time from your linux box

ssh root@openmoko "date -u -s `date -u +%m%d%H%M%Y.%S`"

Setting your local timezone

To have your FreeRunner display time appropriate to your local timezone, update the /etc/localtime symlink to point to the file in /usr/share/zoneinfo that represents your timezone. For example, in an SSH session to the phone, or in a terminal running on the phone:

Setting the date/time automatically with NTP

If your FreeRunner is connected to the internet, you can instead set the time automatically:

opkg install ntpclient
ntpclient -s -h pool.ntp.org

If your FreeRunner is connecting to the internet through a USB host, make sure you allow UDP traffic to pass through on port 123 (NTP) on your host machine or you may get a "no route to host" error from ntpclient.

Syncing the hardware clock

No matter which method you used above, sync the hardware clock with the system time to make your change persist over reboots:

hwclock --systohc

Note: if you run the ASU image, hwclock will not work. Instead you can use:

echo "W\n" > /var/spool/at/trigger

Here is a link from the community mailing list for using hwclock with the ASU image

The last step is the actual syncing of the clock. For this, simply run the GPS Sight program from the main menu, wait for it to find the gps time and click the button labeled "Sync clock".

Future Work

Presumably it might also be possible to use gpspipe (or something else) to set the date once you have a gps fix automatically? In addition, the phone stack should set the date, time, and timezone once connected to a network.

For more information on Linux timekeeping, see Linux, Clocks, and Time. (But ignore mentions of /etc/sysconfig/clock. That doesn't apply to the Openmoko environment.)

Setting the date/time using "date"

To change the date on your FreeRunner, issue one of the following commands:

date -s MMDDhhmm
date -s MMDDhhmmYYYY
date -s MMDDhhmmYYYY.ss

where MM is the month, 01-12; DD is the day, 01-31; hhmm is the time, 0000-2359; YYYY is the optional year, and .ss is the optional seconds.

Setting date/time from your linux box

ssh root@openmoko "date -u -s `date -u +%m%d%H%M%Y.%S`"

Setting your local timezone

To have your FreeRunner display time appropriate to your local timezone, update the /etc/localtime symlink to point to the file in /usr/share/zoneinfo that represents your timezone. For example, in an SSH session to the phone, or in a terminal running on the phone:

Setting the date/time automatically with NTP

If your FreeRunner is connected to the internet, you can instead set the time automatically:

opkg install ntpclient
ntpclient -s -h pool.ntp.org

If your FreeRunner is connecting to the internet through a USB host, make sure you allow UDP traffic to pass through on port 123 (NTP) on your host machine or you may get a "no route to host" error from ntpclient.

Syncing the hardware clock

No matter which method you used above, sync the hardware clock with the system time to make your change persist over reboots:

hwclock --systohc

Note: if you run the ASU image, hwclock will not work. Instead you can use:

echo "W\n" > /var/spool/at/trigger

Here is a link from the community mailing list for using hwclock with the ASU image

The last step is the actual syncing of the clock. For this, simply run the GPS Sight program from the main menu, wait for it to find the gps time and click the button labeled "Sync clock".

Future Work

Presumably it might also be possible to use gpspipe (or something else) to set the date once you have a gps fix automatically? In addition, the phone stack should set the date, time, and timezone once connected to a network.